March 5, 1997

Robin is working on the master tapes to give the negative cutters, which they will use to match the work we've done on the Avid to the actual negative. We have a little decision to make about where to divide the film into reels. It turns out that 16mm film reels should be no longer than 1200 feet (a little more than 30 minutes), which is the length of the reels for the optical sound track. So we have to break our 90-minute film into three pieces, and each break gives projectionists a chance to ruin the film experience. It seems to me that most films place their reel changes between scenes, but we didn't have time to research the issue to find out if there is a good reason for this policy. I decided to put the breaks wherever I thought that a bad changeover would do the least damage, and one of them landed in the middle of a scene. What the hell.

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